A cyber war is coming…

Historically the public square in your local town or city was the place you went to exercise your rights to free speech.

And though demonstrations, protests and rallies still happen weekly, technology has shifted this emphasis and has transformed sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube into online equivalents – or ‘virtual public squares’. Indeed this idea of social media platforms being ‘modern public squares’ was recently endorsed by the US supreme court, which ruled unanimously that barring sex offenders from Facebook and Twitter violated their first amendment rights.

Yet this digital version of the public square is in perilous danger of becoming more closely aligned with a privately owned public space. Why? Because, like almost everything the left and globalist elite stands for, it is literally dripping in the bitter taste of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy of the authoritarian variety.

You see, in everyday life, anyone that dares raise legitimate concerns over uncontrolled immigration is instantly branded racist and shunned from mainstream discourse. It matters little whether that concern centres on the very fair and logical belief that by promoting effective use of border control, the concept of a nation state is maintained and diversity in its true sense is promoted. No, the narrative says that concerns over immigration mean you detest anyone with different skin pigmentation before being lectured over the need to build bridges not walls.

Yet, in the online sphere, apparently different rules apply and walls – or for want of a more accurate term – barriers and blockades are exactly what the powerful left and globalist elites are deploying to anyone on the right of politics.

Getting banned from Facebook isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. But people of a conservative or libertarian persuasion have built a popular and powerful web-based community over the last decade and whilst Britain’s vote to leave the European Union may have bloodied their nose, President Trump being ushered into the Oval Office has seemingly pushed the globalist elite over the edge and now they are fighting back in unceremoniously sinister style.

Growing pressure from the European Union persuaded Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft to sign up to a hate speech ‘code of conduct’ last year which was marketed as ‘fighting racism and xenophobia across Europe’. But, as people on the right will know all too well, when terms such as racism are thrown around so loosely, this grey area was always going to leave counter-narrative figures extremely vulnerable to censorship.

In May, Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to recruit 3,000 extra moderators to effectively police Facebook in order to uphold their Community Standards. And then last week chief security officer Alex Stamos told CNBC they were now banning over one million user accounts every single day. He claimed the majority of these accounts were spammers and fraudsters but he also stated they were banning people who produce ‘hate speech’.

Conservatives are now routinely silenced as Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson recently found out when he was banned for a joke he had made about feminism months in advance. A former Facebook editor confirmed long-held suspicions when he told tech blog Gizmodo that popular conservative news was routinely muted while progressive news was amplified.

Over on Twitter, people such as David Vance are frequently shadow banned for speaking uncomfortable truths and author Shazia Hobbs was banned for highlighting the demonstrable link between Muslim grooming gangs and vulnerable white girls. Yet accounts which tweet things like “FUCK WHITE PEOPLE! Good morning people of colour!” (@The_FastBreak – 26/08/17) are miraculously considered to be the right side of the freedom of expression line. You then also have the mysterious William LeGate who has been waging campaigns to “dox” large pro-Trump accounts and even offering sums of money which lead to their identification.

On YouTube singer Joy Villa received threats to remove her “Make America Great Again” music videos for so-called privacy violations – despite her gaining verbal and written permission from each of the people appearing in the video. The pro-Trump celebrity also said that despite her subscriber count continually increasing; her weekly views had dropped from approximately 20,000 to 2,000. Numerous conservative accounts have reported having their videos demonetized in recent months as content is suddenly deemed too controversial.

Even outside of the big monopolies, others are following a similarly sinister path. This week Tommy Robinson received an email from ticketing platform Ticket Tailor which he had been using to sell tickets for a upcoming book signing in Newcastle. The email stated: “Due to the controversy surrounding your event we have received a number of complaints from our customers… at 4pm today we will be closing the sales of your event on our platform.” However much some people disagree with him, a book signing is hardly a controversial event.

This wave of digital oppression doesn’t stop there. Free speech advocates Gab.ai built and developed a new app for all political views around a year ago and recently raised £1m in a crowdfunding campaign to grow the business further – proving conclusively that there was a gap in the market. Google immediately reacted to this surge in popularity by removing their Android app from the Google Play Store for violating their hate speech policy. In the case of Apple’s App Store, Gab.ai never even met approval for placement after an email from Apple stating it had found “objectionable content”. Sounds like Soviet Russia or North Korea, right? It might as well be but this is happening now – right now – across the West. Despite Gab’s popularity, with a duopoly controlling 95% of mobile device distribution (software and hardware), it becomes impossible to compete in the mobile marketplace as a viable alternative.

Yet saying “I’ve been banned from Facebook/Twitter/YouTube” in a certain tone of voice can almost still feel quite infantile. Like we should get over it and move on. But this is serious. With traditional media declining in popularity, increasingly people do digest their news on social media. As the likes of Google and Apple start enforcing these very arbitrary ‘hate speech’ guidelines and rules, what they are actually banning is your voice – anything pro-Conservative, pro-classical Liberalism, pro-Trump, pro-Brexit, pro-Christian, pro-Nationalism – or, rather, anything that goes against the globalist agenda with their Saudi billions, warchests, lobbyists and legal teams on speed dial.

English novelist George Orwell once famously said: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” And as depressing as it is to admit, we must accept the reality of the situation and rally against it. Truth has become the new hate speech.

Morality policing and the deliberate attempt to control the flow of all information – and of the narrative – is inherently dangerous and has absolutely no place in the West. It is a threat to individual liberties, to freedom of speech and to democracy as we know it. It is a threat we must fight and fight head on.

“If we have to rebuild the entire internet from the bottom up, that’s what we will do. They cannot stop the decentralisation of the internet,” says Gab CEO Andrew Torba. His tone is upbeat and defiant and he is right to be, despite how sorry the situation currently feels.

Now is the time to come together like never before as a movement – truly remembering the end goal and that our unity is what scares the establishment to the core.

Now is the time to support those leading the fight back, and to open your mind to alternatives, and that means contributing to Gab’s legal fund which you can do here.

Now is the time to pressurise our politicians to come up with a way of regulating and dismantling the current monopoly these tech companies enjoy.

But, more importantly, now is the time to stop voting for the same old political parties that maintain this cartel and actually vote for radical change at the ballot box.

Fundamentally, Shy Society was born almost 11 months ago because we were sick of the number of people with common sense viewpoints being shunned into silence. Now, after relative success as a movement online, the powers that be are cracking down in authoritarian style and we will not stand by. Our fathers and forefathers fought in the trenches for the freedoms now being taken away from us by rich and powerful elites. We now enter a new fight for the internet and, rather like being on the frontline, unity is key to dismantling this evil consensus and securing true democracy for future generations.

Shy Society.
Standing up for those without a voice in Britain